Junior Miss Pageant Cindy Bosley Summary

Cindy Bosley reflects, in her essay How I Lost the Junior Miss Pageant, on a childhood memory about her experience losing a beauty pageant to expose that communities pressure individuals to be perfect. Bosley begins her piece by recounting how she would watch the Miss America Pageant, in her youth, and judge the contestants with her own categories. Bosley’s mother watches the contest with her, but, unknown to Bosley, her mother wishes Bosley is the winner. Years later, Bosley enters the Ottumwa Junior Miss Pageant, and Bosley’s mother does everything possible to give Bosley the best chance of winning the contest and finally being the pageant winner her mother always wanted. While Bosley practices for the contest, her mother scrounges up enough …show more content…
Hidden within her memory is the subtle idea that society constantly pushes for perfection. As Bosley exposes, individuals must follow society’s expectations while also remaining in the community or “they don’t ever want you coming back” (36). Thus, those who leave or fail to meet the expectations are not welcome in the community. Although I agree with Bosley’s opinion about a community’s ability to pressure individuals, I must insist that this pressure only successfully works in small communities. Because there are large, thriving subcultures in larger communities, the ability for society to change people diminishes. Bosley fails to mention these subcultures, and thus I am not able to fully support her argument. However, in small communities, Bosley’s point is accurate since the subcultures may consist of one or two people. Therefore society can effectively bully people into conforming or abandoning the community, if the community is small. Thus as Bosley suggests, smaller communities are very effective at influencing how people, who live within the society, will behave. Society uses parents, teachers, and even peer pressure to hint at how you should act by welcoming those who are perfect and scorning all the rest. Bosley states, “How scary (get married). How wasteful (get married). How expensive (get married)... How escapists (get married)” (36). If society disagrees with what you are doing, then the

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